Search This Blog

Broadband, who needs it? Well I guess we all do but sensible pricing has been a long time coming. The e-Envoy Andrew Pinder, believes that the conditions are now in place for us to overtake Germany, Europe’s broadband leader very swiftly indeed; a possible 3-1 to come in eighteen months if you prefer a football analogy?

Pinder had been encouraged by the take up of Broadband services in the opening months of the year. Britain has around 400,000 broadband customers, signed up to the cable networks of NTL and Telewest and to the DSL service offered by BT. In contrast, Germany has 2,2 million DSL subscribers half of the user in Europe, so a return match against the beastly Hun is well overdue.

A year ago, I wrote in The Observer, that it if you lived inside the embrace of the M25, it was very easy to imagine that we all shared the same connectivity potential, through the availability of satellite, cable and DSL on a local basis. But travel outside the major cities and the story can be a very different one.

Almost half the population has yet to join the Internet revolution and Government through a number of different, well-funded initiatives is working to solve the different technical and commercial challenges of bringing the Internet to the population in much the same way as the marvel of the telephone spread through the country and changed peoples lives nearly a century ago.

One tricky problem, yet to be properly solved, involves making broadband available in rural areas further North than the leafier parts of Surrey. As the cash-strapped operators, such as BT, don’t see why they should pick up the bill for a service that would struggle to be even vaguely commercially viable, Government has been forced to set aside £30 million to subsidise the expansion of the service to less well-populated areas. This week, the eMinister, Douglas Alexander revealed a number of projects that, with the help of the £30 million, would introduce broadband services to parts of the country, which include Yorkshire, Humberside and parts of the Midlands. This is of course a start, a line in the sand if you like but in real terms, even in a country as small and overcrowded as our own, I’m wondering if £30 million is more of an encouraging political gesture than a practical solution to the problem of broadband Britain.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Other Apps

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Email

Other Apps

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Not one of us has a clue what the world will look like in five years’ time, yet we are all preparing for that future – As computing power has become embedded in everything from our cars and our telephones to our financial markets, technological complexity has eclipsed our ability to comprehend it’s bigger picture impact on the shape of tomorrow.

Our intuition has been formed by a set of experiences and ideas about how things worked during a time when changes were incremental and somewhat predictable. In March 1953. there were only 53 kilobytes of high-speed RAM on the entire planet.

Today, more than 80 per cent of the value of FTSE 500* firms is ‘now dark matter’: the intangible secret recipe of success; the physical stuff companies own and their wages bill accounts for less than 20 per cent: a reversal of the pattern that once prevailed in the 1970s. Very soon, Everything at scale in this world will be managed by algorithms and data and there’s a need for effective platforms for ma…

“I’m not here to predict the future;” quipped the novelist, Ray Bradbury. “I’m here to prevent it.” And the future looks much like one where giant corporations who hold the most data, the fastest servers, and the greatest processing power will drive all economic growth into the second half of the century.

We live in an unprecedented time. This in the sense that nobody knows what the world will look like in twenty years; one where making confident forecasts in the face of new technologies becomes a real challenge. Before this decade is over, business leaders will face regular and complex decisions about protecting their critical information and systems as more of the existing solutions they have relied upon are exposed as inadequate.

The few real certainties we have available surround the uninterrupted march of Moore’s Law - the notion that the number of transistors in the top-of-the-line processors doubles approximately every two years - and the unpredictability of human nature. Exper…

The 13th century theologian and philosopher, William of Ockham, who once lived in his small Surrey village, not so very far from what is today, the wide concrete expanse of Gatwick airport is a frequently referenced source of intellectual reason. His contribution to modern culture was Ockham’s Razor, which cautions us when problem solving, that “The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct;” sound advice which constantly proves to be true.

A week further-on since Britain’s second busiest airport was bought to a complete standstill by two or perhaps two hundred different drone sightings, it is perhaps time to revisit William of Ockham’s maxim, rather than be led astray by an increasingly bizarre narrative, one which has led Surrey police up several blind alleys with little or nothing in the way of measurable results.

Exploring the possibilities with a little help in reasoning from our medieval friar, we appear to have a choice of two different account…